Malta catches most people off guard. It’s tiny, you can drive across the main island in under an hour, but it somehow manages to pack in prehistoric temples older than the pyramids, a medieval walled city where about 300 people actually live, a UNESCO-listed capital built by crusading knights, and some of the clearest water in the Mediterranean. Add in the sister island of Gozo and the turquoise speck of Comino and you have more than enough to fill a week without repeating yourself.
Here are seven things genuinely worth your time.
Valletta is the world’s smallest capital city, and it’s the kind of place that punishes rushing. The streets are laid out in a neat military grid (the Knights of St John planned it that way in the 1560s), but what that grid doesn’t show you is that every cross street drops sharply toward the sea, and the views at the bottom are spectacular. It takes about five minutes of walking to understand why this city is UNESCO-listed.
St John’s Co-Cathedral is the obvious first stop and rightly so. The façade is plain on purpose. The Knights built it to look humble from the outside, which makes the interior genuinely shocking when you walk through the door: every inch of the floor is covered in marble tombstones, the walls are layered in gold, and somewhere in the oratory there are two Caravaggio paintings that most people come specifically to see. They are worth the entrance fee by themselves.
After the cathedral, walk to the Upper Barrakka Gardens and time it for noon or 4pm. That’s when uniformed officials fire a cannon salute across the Grand Harbour, a tradition going back to 1812 that still draws a crowd every single day. The views from the gardens over the Three Cities across the water are the best in Valletta.
For food, skip Republic Street and go one block parallel. Grano on St Lucia Street does Maltese sandwiches in ftira bread that people talk about for weeks after leaving. Is-Suq tal-Belt, the renovated food market near the city gate, is the easiest option if you’re with a group and everyone wants something different. In the evening, Strait Street is where to be. It was the navy’s red-light district for most of its history and is now lined with wine bars and jazz, which is a reasonable upgrade.
Most visitors walk straight past the entrance to the Lascaris War Rooms without realising it’s there, which is a shame because it’s one of the most interesting things to do in Malta. The tunnels run under the Upper Barrakka Gardens and housed the Allied command headquarters during the Second World War. Malta was bombed relentlessly between 1940 and 1942, receiving the George Cross as an entire nation for holding out, and these tunnels are where the people running that defence actually worked. The rooms have been restored to how they looked at the time, maps and communications equipment and all of it, and the guided tours give you a sense of the pressure that existed down there in a way that reading about it doesn’t quite replicate.
Getting to Gozo takes about 25 minutes on the ferry from Cirkewwa, and it runs constantly so there’s no need to book ahead. The crossing itself is free on the way back to Malta, which is a pleasant surprise. Once you’re on the island, how you get around makes a significant difference to what you actually see.
Buses cover the basics. A hire car covers more. But for reaching the parts of Gozo that most visitors miss entirely, a Gozo quad tour is hard to beat. Guided tours take small groups in convoy through back roads and tracks that a standard hire car finds genuinely difficult, stopping at places like the Ta’ Cenc cliffs in the south, the salt pans at Xwejni carved into the coastal rock centuries ago, Dwejra Bay with its Inland Sea and Fungus Rock, and smaller coastal spots that have no signage and no parking lots. It’s a full day and covers a serious amount of the island.
Renting a quad independently works well too if you’d rather plan your own route and go at your own pace. Either way, Gozo rewards having something low and nimble. A lot of what makes the island interesting is at the end of tracks that don’t appear on general maps.
While you’re on the island, Ġgantija is not something to skip. The temple complex sits on the Xagħra plateau in the northeast of Gozo and the south temple dates to around 3600 BC, which makes it older than the Egyptian pyramids by several centuries and older than Stonehenge. It is one of the oldest freestanding structures on Earth. The name comes from ġgant, the Maltese word for giant, and standing at the outer wall you immediately understand why the folklore went that way. Some of those limestone blocks weigh more than 50 tons, moved and placed by builders who had no metal tools, no wheel, no mortar.
The interpretation centre before the temples is worth taking seriously rather than rushing through on the way to the main site. It has two limestone heads found inside one of the temple rooms, pottery decorated with a northern lapwing that suggests whoever made it was working from observation rather than guesswork, and decorated blocks removed from the site for protection. Go in the morning before the tour groups arrive and allow ninety minutes for the whole visit.
Comino is a tiny island sitting between Malta and Gozo with a permanent population of around four people and a stretch of water that gets photographed more than almost anything else in the Mediterranean. The Blue Lagoon really is that colour. Shallow, completely clear, turquoise in a way that looks like a filter has been applied even when you’re standing in it. In summer it gets very crowded, which is useful to know in advance rather than after you’ve arrived.
The standard approach is a boat trip from either Malta or Gozo, and plenty of operators run day trips that combine the lagoon with the sea caves around Comino’s coastline. Going early in the morning makes a considerable difference. The water is the same colour at 8am as it is at noon, but the number of boats stacked at the shore is not. May, June, September and October are the sweet spot if you have flexibility on timing. The water is still warm, the crowds are thinner, and the whole experience is considerably more pleasant than the peak summer version.
Mdina is the old capital of Malta, a walled medieval city on a hilltop in the centre of the island with views across most of the country. About 300 people actually live there, which gives it a quiet quality that’s unusual for somewhere firmly on the tourist trail. The narrow streets, the limestone palaces, the baroque cathedral: it all holds up, and it’s genuinely one of the more atmospheric places in Malta.
Fontanella Tea Garden on the city’s ramparts is the famous stop, known for its cakes and the views over the Maltese countryside stretching away below. It’s always busy and it earns it. The cakes are good and the terrace tables with views over the fortification walls are worth queuing for.
Rabat sits right outside Mdina’s gates and most visitors don’t give it enough time. The catacombs under St Paul’s Basilica are one of the more underrated things to do in Malta, a network of early Christian burial tunnels that extend much further than they look from the entrance. Crystal Palace Bar, known locally as Is-Serkin, is the place for pastizzi, those flaky pastry pockets filled with ricotta or mushy peas that Maltese people eat at any hour of the day or night. They cost about 60 cents each. It’s open 24 hours and worth stopping at even if you’re just passing through.
Dwejra in the west of Gozo is the island at its most dramatic. The Azure Window, the natural rock arch that appeared in Game of Thrones, collapsed into the sea during a storm in 2017. The bay itself is still one of the most spectacular spots in the Maltese islands and worth visiting on that basis alone.
The Inland Sea is a saltwater lagoon, separated from the open Mediterranean by a tall cliff with a natural tunnel running through it. Local boat operators run short trips through that tunnel for a few euros, and it’s one of those things that sounds like a tourist gimmick right up until you’re actually in it. The Blue Hole nearby is one of the top dive sites in Europe, a natural rock formation with an underwater arch leading out to open water, with visibility that regularly exceeds 30 metres on a good day. If you don’t dive, the area above water is still worth seeing for the rock formations and the wide views out across the sea.
A short drive from Dwejra is Wied il-Mielaħ, a natural arch that doesn’t have the same name recognition as the Azure Window but is arguably more accessible. There are stairs down to the shoreline and the views of the arch from below are excellent. Because most people don’t know about it, it’s usually quiet even when Dwejra is busy.
Malta’s bus network is better than it looks and covers the main towns well enough. For Gozo, the ferry from Cirkewwa runs around the clock and the crossing to Gozo takes about 25 minutes. Summers in Malta are genuinely hot, July and August regularly hit over 35 degrees, so May, June, September and October are the most comfortable months for doing anything that involves being outside for long periods. Most restaurants don’t really fill up until 8pm, and the best places often don’t take reservations, so arriving early tends to work better than arriving on time.
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